I still dislike the principle of gluing the battery so strongly Apple itself won’t service it without changing the whole case, but it’s hard to complain when I get a shiny new case and keyboard for the flat battery service fee.

9 March

But Swarm’s 0.25U satellites were too small for the FCC, which denied launch permission citing concerns about tracking and collision avoidance. Apparently, Swarm launched anyway. I think this would be the first unauthorized launch of commercial satellites ever.

10 March

I really want a “tinder but for yelp” app. People keep asking me to pick dinner and brunch spots and I generally find this to be too much work and anxiety. I just want to mindlessly swipe until I find something.

Established scientifically with the help of a friend — by comparing verbal impressions and listening to leakage in a crowded McDonald’s — that my ears are optimally formed for AirPods and it would have been a crime not to buy them.

18 March

The work that CA is accused of doing—building “psychographic profiles” based on demographics and online behavior in order to figure out how to segment and market to a vulnerable population—is a succinct description of how Facebook makes money.

I’ve added a third-party smart plug to my Philips Hue setup (to control a big, bright LED panel) and the relay’s mechanical noise really bothers me. Reminds me every time of a capacitor burning out or a hard drive crashing, and takes a lot away from the electronic magic.

Since I’m evidently done with my Apple boycott I just bought a used 7 Plus and 1) I’m in love with the live photo effects and 2) I immediately started thinking about remaking my apps with ARKit goddammit sometimes being a developer means you just can’t help yourself.

Ok, look, whether or not it’s a “breach” is irrelevant to whether Facebook is culpable or has bad policies. But it’s not pedantic nitpicking to want reports to get this right. It’s important that people understand it’s a policy problem and not some isolated security issue. [twitter.com]

I’d forgotten how dumb it is that there are two levels of 3D Touch on the iPhone’s screen. Thank god Instagram is smart enough to have the same action on long-press and semi-push, even if that’s not Apple’s UX recommendation.

21 March

Unpopular opinion: the way the media covered Hillary Clinton’s emails did much more to make Donald Trump president than anything Cambridge Analytica, or even Facebook, did. And it was less defensible on the merits.

22 March

A friend and I both recently switched to more recent iPhones and I am appalled by the amount of noise reduction in photos — it never seemed that bad to me on iPhone 6. Compounded of course, and that part’s not new, by the system app’s refusal to shoot or even display RAW images.

Pictures look awful when you zoom in. Of course that doesn’t matter if you’re just posting to your Instagram story, but then for that usage they would also look fine without any noise reduction, so what’s the point? Who benefits?

This is 100% right. Zuckerberg threatening to sue the outlets who broke the stories while giving interviews to the ones who didn’t shows that the leadership of Facebook is a part of the problem. [twitter.com]

Google’s light fields of the space shuttle at the Smithsonian are incredible — it’s weird to see that much detail and texture in a VR headset. But at the same time it’s terribly frustrating that you can’t actually move.

23 March

Right now Google’s rig takes thirty seconds to produce a shot but I wonder if their rumored acquisition of Lytro would enable them to make light fields in Street View. Feels like that’s got to be the goal?

Experimenting with a new Skydio Voxels mode in our Android app. I’m streaming map and segmentation data from the R1 to a Pixel 2 phone and then using shaders to render an AR overlay. Still a little rough around the edges, but it’s all running in real-time!

The most interesting point about Facebook’s call/sms logs is that they were revealed by the info dumps they allow users to download. An engineer wrote a script to format that data into HTML and it never occurred to anyone involved that users might be creeped out.

As much as I enjoy my devices and computers in grayscale, I’ve realized it would probably be even better if I could keep color saturation at something like 10%. Still not distracting, but more informative—and a bit less sad.